“The most important thing in communication is to hear the thing that isn’t being said.” – Peter Drucker

We believe that ambitious companies encourage communication. They reach out to employees, customers and investors and actively listen. They ask questions, they start conversations, they respond to suggestions. The old model of one-to-many advertising and marketing is giving way to a many-to-many dialogue between the company, its employees and the wider world.

For example, Microsoft hasn’t given up on traditional PR and advertising but its thousands of employee bloggers have created a new forum for communication. They present a more human face for the company and provide a valuable source of new ideas, feedback and customer support.

Meaningful brands

Big ideas form connections with customers. Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, describes an emerging “attraction economy” in which there is a “fundamental shift in control from manufacturers and retailers to consumers.” In this brave new world, “the future belongs to those who make emotional connections with them.” A big idea can help forge these ties of affection.

In Roberts’s world, communication is destiny. Ambitious companies use their brand – everything that represents the company – as a way of communicating what they stand for. Superbrands lists the UK’s 500 strongest consumer brands as voted by experts and consumers. They judge a brand on quality, reliability and distinction:

• Quality. Does the brand represent quality products and services?
• Reliability. Can you trust the brand to deliver consistently against its promises and maintain product and service standards at all customer touch points?
• Distinction. Is it well known in its sector? Is the brand suitably differentiated from its competitors?

We would add two more elements: inspiration and authenticity. Does the brand inspire loyalty and commitment and does it honestly reflect the reality of the business behind it?

Open staff communication

Ambitious companies have a constant, deep dialogue with staff. On the one hand, they are able to articulate ‘what it means to work here,’ according to Tamara Erickson and Lynda Gratton. On the other, there is an open channel for staff feedback. Toyota is a good example of how this might work. At their car factory at Burnaston, near Derby and engine factory at Deeside in North Wales, they have implemented the company-wide practice of Kaizen (or ‘continuous improvement’). In one Toyota factory in the USA, 7,000 employees made more than 75,000 suggestions in 1999 and 99 percent of them were implemented.

It’s a conversation, not a lecture

Consumers are rightly sceptical of conventional advertising and PR. They distrust it and gravitate towards companies that they trust. One way to build that trust is to create a conversation with customers.

Traditional marketing techniques have a role here: focus groups, customer forums and so on. Increasingly, though, ambitious companies are using new online technology. They are opening stores in Second Life, a virtual 3D world. They are establishing a presence on social network site MySpace. And, of course, they are blogging. Large companies in the UK are slower to adopt blogging than their American cousins. Executives at Boeing, Sun, Microsoft and AOL blog, but it is hard to find any FTSE 500 directors with blogs.

Reaching out to customers is smart in other ways. Customers who feel a connection are more likely to champion it to their friends. It can also help cut support costs. Zopa, a UK online loans company, relies on devoted customers to provide most of its technical support through a wiki (a kind of user-created encyclopaedia) and bulletin board.

The kind of company-to-employee dialogue in Toyota or employee-to-customer blogging in Microsoft or the company-to-consumer branding of the Superbrands is exactly the kind of communication Ambitious companies thrive on.